I just love looking at these pictures…..

Best Napa Valley Wineries to Visit

The best Napa Valley wineries to visit feature a tasting room in a cave, artisanal cheese pairings, on-site sommeliers and more.

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Love!

Latino Winemakers Rise in California, Through the Ranks

SONOMA, Calif. — It is harvest season in wine country, the time of year when the scent of crushed grapes infuses the air and flatbed trucks heavy with fruit cargo come lurching down narrow back roads.

For the winemaker Everardo Robledo — who grew up working in the fields alongside his father, Reynaldo, on weekends and after school — the harvest has a particular emotional resonance: a measure of how far the family has come since his Mexican immigrant grandfather drifted from one migrant labor camp to another and his father toiled in the vineyards for $1.10 an hour.

Mr. Robledo, 30, and his family are part of a tiny but growing fraternity of Mexican-American winemakers, many of them farmworkers’ children who now pursue wine business degrees or study viticulture and oenology at the University of California, Davis. “It’s what we have been doing all our lives,” the younger Mr. Robledo said of picking, pruning, trellising, planting and “suckering,” or removing unwanted shoots from vines. “The land is in our DNA.”

For tourists here and in other wine-producing regions, the harvest is an opportunity to swirl, sniff and sip wine, stomp grapes and revel in dinners by master chefs. In Sonoma, visitors can experience an annual “grape camp” whose Web site advertises “three blissful days” picking grapes.

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Third Annual Project Zin 

The Hotel Healdsburg is by far my favorite place to sleep in Napa/Sonoma and on August 17th, you can drink some of the most sought after Zinfandels paired with food from Chef Charlie Palmer in their annual Project Zin event.    I’ll have to check my schedule but I may just have to pop up there for this!

All proceeds benefit the Down Syndrome Association North Bay.